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Originally posted by Ebonmuse
spin: There are problems with the Tel Dan inscription.
How so? I'm aware it was found in secondary context, with pieces of it reused as building material for a later structure, but it was found in situ, was it not?
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There have been a number of informal reports I have seen regarind such things as chisel marks on the stone. I think that Russell Gmirkin has published on one problem about it, despite the fact that he wasn't given permission to examine it.
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He [Dever] is spending quite a bit of time arguing with the minimalists, but when you say he doesn't provide enough justification I must disagree. This book provides a great deal of evidence. And he has said he's a secular humanist himself; I do not believe he's anxious to confirm as much of the biblical record as possible. To me, in this debate it's the minimalists who seem to be working from the position of greatest ideological bias, and we shouldn't disregard that just because their conclusions are friendly to our position. What's most important is what conclusion the evidence supports.
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I see the debate is partially about what is acceptible evidence. Dever tends to arbitrarily choose to support biblical material as a starting point for his extra-archaeological analyses. Others say this is not kosher. You need to justify the use of a secondary text as relevant to the period and if there were some way of justifying it, you would be more interested in the justifying evidence than the secondary material. I skimmed a new Dever book a couple of years ago and he seemed far from scientific in approach when he was not dealing strictly with dirt archaeology.
spin
11-25-2003, 05:18 PM
